W3C Printing workshop Minutes 25th April `96

The main outcome of the workshop is an agreement to form
a working group on fonts and a mailing list for people to jointly
discuss printing issues. All attendees will be placed on this list
while people are expected to email
Chris Lilley if they want
to be part of the W3C font working group.

1 WELCOME / INTRODUCTION

Dave Raggett opened the workshop by sketching the issues involved.
There is a general feeling that the web has an enormous potential for
printing. How can W3C help? We have done work in HTML, style sheets,
PICS, HTTP. What are the missing pieces? Should we establish working
groups for printing and/or fonts?

TEKTRONIX (John Thomas): Tektronix has introduced a printer that
serves web pages for administration. More than 3 pages of information
is too much on the screen and needs to be printed. Alas, images show
up poorly on the printed page, and it's frustrating to follow
separate links and print separately. Rather, a webcrawler should
fetch several documents and print them together. Unfollowed links
should end up in the bibliography. This would be a competitive
advantage for browsers! Fractal image formats may enhance printing
since compressed images can be scaled up without pixel-replication.
Web connectivity should go into the printer.

HARRY CUFF PUBLICATIONS (Jeffrey Cuff):

Three areas of interest:

typographic layer: We are still in the dark ages of
computer-mediated typography. In the move to DTP, a lot of the old
typographic controls were lost. Style sheets address some of these, but
we need stream overrides: a stream to the printer, a stream to the
screen etc.

object layer: an object-oriented view should be taken. Inheritance
is a good concept. Also, in authoring environments, we need stylistic
values to flow from the specific to the more general, "reverse
inheritance".

semantic layer: there is a gap between W3C and Netscape, semantics
is the dividing line and semantics is a core issue. We need mechanisms
for semantic to typographic mapping.

FAST FORWARD TECHNOLOGIES (Leslie Cuff): Fast Forward Technologies is
a company supporting information technology as a means to diversify
the rural economy. To do printing on the web, we need need a flexible
mechanism for identifying the 'boundary layer' of a hypertext. Links
have a measure of the 'length' associated with their traversal. This
length would be context sensitive, alas, so it's not a trivial job.
Link length combined with a default ordering and traversal algorithm
would be a way to specify the structure of a collection as a target
for printing.

ADOBE (Stephen Zilles): Adobe has long experience in the area of
printing. Our solutions solve problems on paper, but not always on the
screen. Among our interests are:

a webfont proposal: alas, the technical details of the proposals
cannot be covered today

a proposal for handling graphical data: let's use PDF! There is a
synergy between HTML and PDF for structure and text. PDF will
represent graphical elements, and provides for hyperlinks. HTML + PDF
is more powerful than either alone.

negotiation with printers, frames in documents etc.

FUTURETENSE (BC Krishna): We have been developing a Java-based
publishing system that can coexist with HTML. The Java applet can
download fonts etc. We are concerned about the same issues as previous
speakers: fonts, portability, separation of content and form etc. What
does it mean to embed a font in a semantic document? We are also
interested in cross-media publishing (Transcoding!), which should be
easy/possible in both directions. Ahead, We will see many print
buttons and each of them will have a different function.

LEXMARK (Don Wright): Most of our issues have been raised by previous
speakers. The solutions have to be open industry standards. We need a
plan attack these high priority issues: print quality, fonts, page
layout, paper vs. "glass".

IBM PRINTING SYSTEMS (Roger deBry): We are working on print server and
print management systems. In the past, we have collaborated with
MIT/Athena on these issues. What what functions can one offload from
browsers? Let the print server do the job!

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN (Spencer Thomas): While previous speakers have
problems, we have solutions! JSTOR is working on digitizing archives
for online presentation, printing etc. We have close to 1M pages
online, with 100k pages being added per month. Publishers are
interested in faithful replications. Libraries no longer need to keep
paper on expensive shelf space. Our process includes: 600dpi scanning
(close to human visual resolution) index generation, OCR. The system
combines images and indexing.

HARLEQUIN (Sumner Saitz): We are a geographically distributed company
that have products in several relevant area: lisp development,
implementation of the Dylan programming language, high-end PostScript
RIPS, WebMaker: a FrameMaker to HTML conversion system. Our customers
are interested in structured documents and printing.

BOOKMAKER (Hal Schectman): Our product can print booklets from web
pages etc. The scaled down booklet format is often more useful than a
stack of paper.

BITSTREAM (John Collens?): Bitstream is a supplier of fonts, and font
technology. We have gone through a process from closed to open
systems; we would like to work with any format, coding system and
platform. TrueDoc solves may of these problems: it captures the shape
of the font and transports it to the viewer. There, the format is
unpacked and the font is usable on an output device. We want to make the
tools to realize this available.

MICROSOFT (Steve Waters): Microsoft has changed w.r.t. standards.
These days, we are happy to work with W3C and other organizations.
Printing on the Web today is a crutch that will not withstand? the
expected attention. Many of the problems can be solved on the browser
side, but most will need to happen on the author side. There will be
no single solution to all printing problems, but HTML should cover
100% of the needs of 80% of the people. HTML is evolving into a
"container" language for text, graphics, multimedia and active
applets. Style sheets can help solve problems, we can have on
different style sheets for different devices. There is plenty of "low
fruit" out there. Specifically, we would like to see an HTML tag that
can tell us where font resources are available. Also, we will present
a proposed color standard (sRGB) that is a result of collaboration
with HP.

MONOTYPE TYPOGRAPHY (Brian Kraimer): We are especially interested in
font issues, and want a clear indication of where and how these issue
will develop.

KODAK (Terry Lund): Kodak are interested in all issues that have been
raised. We want to deliver printing solutions for web servers, also we
have digital cameras. One issue: more image systems should be
hierarchical!

XEROX (Jim Thornton): Xerox Parc has a long tradition of work in
high-quality & high-speed printing. In general, the printer should do
more of the work than what is the case today.

CSS was presented by Hakon Lie

CSS [1] is a simple style sheet mechanism that allows authors and
readers to attach stylistic information to HTML documents. The first
generation -- CSS1 -- is focused on glass devices but better support
for printing should and will be added. A CSS-based proposal on frames
[2] for layout will be extended to support multi-page documents.

A: W3C has announced Web Style Sheets with wide industry backing.
Microsoft has announced browser support, and Spyglass will put support
into their toolkit. We invite and expect other companies to follow.

HTTP presented by Henrik Frystyk Nielsen

HTTP 1.0 was not designed for the Web of today. The next time it has
to be right!

http 1.1 will include

persistent connections

host information is contained in each request

extensive support for caching

Deployment of HTTP 1.1 is urgent

Content negotiation was explained, HTTP 1.2 will support content
negotiation.

Q: when will content negotiation be discussed/designed?

A: Discussions take place on the IETF mailing lists, and the design
should be ready by the end of the summer.

Q: what's the status of URNs

A: Nobody wants to discuss it, it's a technical as well as a social problem

Q: Isn't persistent connections a browser -- not a protocol -- issue?

A: No, it's also a protocol issue.

Standard Color Model for RGB

Matthew Anderson (Microsoft) and Ricardo Motta (HP) presented the sRGB
proposal. sRGB is a standard color space that will make it possible to
reproduce colors in a predictable manner on the Web.

After lunch, the workshop was split into two groups after lunch:

Fonts

CSS/HTML and Document Collection

CSS/HTML

Leader: John Thomas

Problem statement: how to extend CSS and/or HTML to address the needs
of HQ printing on the Web

CSS1 covers: fonts, colors, spacing. For printing the following
requirements were suggested: